Students' daily activity and beliefs about the world before and after a campus shooting

Abstract

How do students' beliefs about the world and their everyday exploratory behaviors change after a mass campus shooting? In the present longitudinal study, an on-campus shooting occurred in the middle of data collection, resulting in an unplanned pre-post quasi-experiment to investigate whether the association between world beliefs and behavior changed after a traumatic event. Over three two-week waves of data collection, with the shooting happening in the middle of the second wave, we measured students' general beliefs about the world (their primal world beliefs), daily physical movement, the activities they were doing, how typical those activities were, and how close participants felt to the people they were with. Unsurprisingly, students exhibited less exploratory movement patterns immediately following the shooting. After the shooting, but not before, safe world belief predicted how much people physically explored their environment, and enticing world belief predicted how varied a person's activities were. Primal world beliefs did not significantly change from before the shooting to after, demonstrating their stability. We speculate that the post-shooting campus environment was more ambiguous than the pre-shooting environment, allowing beliefs about the world to be more strongly associated with behavior.